I was thinking the other day...

about Gen Z Women and their Gender Wars

The Most Dangerous Number in the Gender Wars Isn’t the One You Think

It’s not the men going backward. It’s the women who believe they’re winning.

Two surveys popped up on my feeds recently. Read separately, they’re depressing. Read together, they’re a five-alarm fire — and nobody is talking about the fire.

Survey one: A global study by Ipsos and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London found that a third of Gen Z men believe a woman should obey her husband and defer to him on major decisions. A quarter think women shouldn’t appear too independent. More than 20% say men who care for their own children are less masculine.

Survey two: Talker Research surveyed 2,000 women and found that half of Gen Z women say their gender has held them back — more than any other generation. Forty-five percent say their ideas are more likely to be dismissed. Thirty-five percent say they’re paid less than male colleagues.

Here’s where it gets interesting, to say the least.

Nearly three in five Gen Z women believe that pay gaps, healthcare gaps, and leadership gaps will close in their lifetime.

Fifty-eight percent. JFC

In the same generation where one in three of their male peers thinks she should be obedient.

I need you to sit with that tension for a moment, because I don’t think we’ve named what it actually is.

What Gen X Knows That Nobody Is Saying Out Loud

I am a Gen X woman. Which means I am old enough to have been told, with a straight face, that if I just worked hard enough, leaned in far enough, code-switched well enough, and kept my ambition carefully packaged in the right kind of smile — the system would eventually reward me. I call it The Big Lie and I’ve written about it extensively.

We were the generation that got so close. We watched the glass ceiling develop cracks. We became the first women in rooms that had never had us. We built our careers inside systems designed around someone else’s defaults and told ourselves we were making progress.

And then we watched the metrics.

The wage gap, stubbornly parked around $0.82 on the dollar for decades. The VC funding gap — women-led companies receiving 2.1% of venture capital while generating $3.3 trillion in annual revenue. The leadership gap, the credibility gap, the “she’s too aggressive / too soft / too much / not enough” gap.

Gen X women didn’t just feel these gaps. We documented them. We made the business case for them. We turned ourselves into data.

And somewhere in that process — somewhere between making the case and waiting for the verdict — we learned something that I don’t think we’ve passed on clearly enough to the generation behind us:

Awareness of a problem and power to change it are not the same thing.

The Optimism Trap

Here is what I know about optimism inside oppressive systems: it is the most sophisticated tool those systems have.

Not because hope is bad. Hope is oxygen. But there is a particular kind of optimism — patient optimism, incremental optimism, things-are-slowly-getting-better optimism — that functions as a pressure release valve. It lets enough hope out to prevent an explosion. And, importantly for right now, It keeps people invested in a system that is not investing in them.

Gen X women were patient. We were optimistic. We believed in the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice, as long as we kept pulling.

And now we have data — from this very week — showing that Gen Z men are more retrograde than Baby Boomers on gender attitudes. Not slightly more. Meaningfully more. A generation raised with the internet, with theoretically more access to feminist discourse than any generation in history, has somehow traveled backward.

Baby Boomers are half as likely to believe women should be obedient.

Half as likely.

Let me say that again in plain language: the generation we spent thirty years condescending to with “OK, Boomer” is more gender-progressive than the generation that came after us.

So when 58% of Gen Z women say they’re optimistic that the gaps will close in their lifetime — I don’t read that as a sign of progress.

I read it as a warning sign.

Because the data doesn’t support that optimism. The cultural signals actively contradict it. And history tells us, with brutal consistency, that optimism about systems that weren’t built for you is not a strategy. It’s a sedative.

What the Industry Got Wrong — And Keeps Getting Wrong

I’ve spent years inside the industry that is supposed to fix this. Women’s leadership conferences. Diversity initiatives. Mentorship pipelines. “Female founder” funds. Lean in circles. Authenticity workshops. Empowerment summits.

I’ve been in the rooms. I know the people. I believe in their intentions.

And I am telling you, with full conviction: the model is wrong.

Not because awareness doesn’t matter. Not because community doesn’t matter. Not because representation doesn’t matter.

But because every single one of these initiatives has one fatal flaw: they operate inside the system they’re trying to change. They bring women to tables that were built without them, teach those women the customs of those tables, celebrate when one woman gets a slightly better chair — and call that progress.

The funding gap didn’t close. The wage gap didn’t close. The credibility gap didn’t close. Gen Z men moved backward.

After decades of the most sustained women’s empowerment industry in human history, we are watching the cultural sentiment among young men regress toward mid-century values. The model is not working. And continuing to run the same model while expecting different results is not persistence. It has a different name.

The Confrontation

So here it is. The dangerous part. The thing I’m not supposed to say.

Gen Z women’s optimism might be the most dangerous number in both of these surveys — not because hope is wrong, but because hope aimed at the wrong target is a beautiful way to waste the most energized, aware, structurally-conscious generation of women we have ever produced.

These young women know exactly what’s happening to them. They can name it precisely. They feel it in job applications and healthcare appointments and meeting rooms and bedrooms. They have the language, the data, the consciousness.

And if we hand them the same tools we handed Gen X — the lean-in playbook, the seat-at-the-table strategy, the patient-optimism-while-filing-a-better-business-case approach — we will have failed them completely.

Because here’s what the data, history, and basic structural analysis all agree on:

“You cannot dismantle a system by making yourself useful to it.”

Immigrant communities didn’t build generational wealth by making a better case for inclusion. Black Wall Street didn’t circulate the dollar 36 times by asking to be let into someone else’s economy. Every community that has ever built real, durable power has done it the same way: by building their own infrastructure, their own institutions, their own internal economic velocity — and creating so much gravity that the old system had to adjust to them.

That is not a metaphor. That is a model. And it is the only model that has ever actually worked.

What I’m Building — And What I’m Asking

Gen Z women are the most dangerous generation of women in history — dangerous to the old system, that is — if we give them somewhere to go with that consciousness.

Not another conference. Not another mentorship program. Not another book about how to succeed in hostile environments.

An economy. Their own. Built by women, funded by women, circulating among women, serving women first.

Because the difference between a movement and an economy is how many times a dollar circulates before it leaves.

And right now, women’s dollars leave after one transaction.

Gen Z women: your awareness is not the problem. Your optimism is not the problem. The target of that optimism is the problem.

Stop aiming it at a system that just told you — through the men in your own generation, in plain data — that it is not moving toward you.

Aim it at us. At what we’re building together.

Because the most powerful thing you can do with that consciousness isn’t to stay optimistic that the old system will change.

It’s to build something it has to reckon with.

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Rene Huey-Lipton is the founder of DAME — Daring Authenticity. Meaningful Existence — and the author of A Blueprint for WE: The Women’s Economy. She writes about authentic leadership, economic power, and the architecture of systems that were never built for us — and what we’re building instead.